Man, it's bad down here. Worse I can ever remember it in Oregon. Woke up to my car covered in ash. Some idiot kid playing with fireworks started the eagle creek fire burning in the gorge which has now jumped to both sides of the Colombia. Some of the pictures from this fire are apocalyptic. I was hiking the eagle creek trail just a few weeks ago, that's some dense, gnarly forest. Multnomah falls lodge has fire burning directly above it. Chetco fire in southern Oregon is even worse down near brookings.

Last edited by JSeahawks on Tue Sep 05, 2017 9:16 am, edited 2 times in total.

The first picture in the gallery in that article is from where I live, North Bend, WA. I've never seen anything like what I woke up to this morning. At 6:30am it was 87 degrees, there was a hot, strong wind, ash covering everything, the smoke was so thick it was alarming. I immediately turned on the news and started looking online, because I thought there must've been a fire very, very close to us. I was amazed to find out that all of this is from fires on the east side of Snoqualmie Pass, near Cle Elum. It's just shocking how bad it is in North Bend.

I work in Redmond and it is much, much better down here, but I am really not looking forward to going home later. You can smell the smoke inside our house, outside it's almost unbearable. Also, we have no way to cool our house other than opening the windows, which obviously isn't an option. I'm honestly a little worried about our cats, even though they are indoor cats.

Like I said, I've never seen anything like this before in my life. I hope we get a change in the weather/winds soon.

Seems like there's so many more forest fires these days than there was when I was growing up. I hear people say that part of it is due to a decrease in logging and keeping the forests thinned, and that also when the loggers were out in the forest, there was a better first line of defense for putting out the fires (the loggers would put out the fires).

fenderbender123 wrote:Seems like there's so many more forest fires these days than there was when I was growing up. I hear people say that part of it is due to a decrease in logging and keeping the forests thinned, and that also when the loggers were out in the forest, there was a better first line of defense for putting out the fires (the loggers would put out the fires).

Below is a short Tedx Talk that a friend of mine's Dad did. Logging is actually attributed to being one of the reasons that forest fires are getting so bad. Loggers would cut down the largest, healthiest and unknowingly the most fire-resistant trees (due to their size, age, thickness of bark). So what has happened is a lot of areas that have been logged previously have a lot of dense "underbrush" and/or much smaller and younger trees that have grown in the place of the larger trees. Lightning strikes after dry spells during the summer and the forest fires consume the younger trees and brush that can't withstand the heat and thus become fuel and spreads much easier than anything we've seen before.

It's a good watch, though his full presentation is much more impressive and gives a better idea of what's causing this "Era of Megafires" and what we can do to prevent/minimize them in the future.

We've got less than a mile of visibility here in Wenatchee, intermittent ash-showers and smoke over the last 6 or 7 days. Fun times.

I've never ever seen it this bad. Our air quality on a scale of 1 to 10 is 1 today. Ash everywhere. Sky is yellow. Moon is red at night, as is the sun. The smell of smoke is strong if I open the back door to let my dog out. Disgusting. Stay safe folks.

There are three certainties in life. Death, taxes and the perpetual shuffling of the Seattle Seahawks offensive line.

I live in Bothell, and I was surprised to come out this morning to find a light covering of ash on my car. The inside of my vehicle looked like it hadn't been dusted/cleaned in years, too. Light ash floating all over the place in the air...crazy.

Of course, people that were here for Mount St. Helens are probably like "lol, you noobs don't know anything."

RolandDeschain wrote:I live in Bothell, and I was surprised to come out this morning to find a light covering of ash on my car. The inside of my vehicle looked like it hadn't been dusted/cleaned in years, too. Light ash floating all over the place in the air...crazy.

Of course, people that were here for Mount St. Helens are probably like "lol, you noobs don't know anything."

Yes Iro you know nothing....................

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